'Black & White': Fun take on the hardboiled genre

Black & White (2018)
Starring: Emily Inserra, Nick D'Ambrosia, Amber Walker, Tommy Barbara, Jaime Plitnick, Dave Cifelli, and Alex Luckenbaugh
Director: "Collective Brain"
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

After getting black-out drunk at a party, college girl Rose (Inserra) wakes up to find that everything around her now appears in shades of gray. She sets out to reconstruct what happened the night before and to hopefully get some color back into her life!

"Black & White" is a well-crafted spoof of the hardboiled detective thrillers where the main character is trying to piece together a mystery that has deep and personal ramifications for his or her future, but which consists of clues and mysteries within mysteries that defy meaning until they are all uncovered and put together. In this case, the detective role is a party girl who has a bad habit of getting drunk and breaking up with her boyfriend, but her narration is hilariously hardboiled, as is a couple of the actions she takes while seeking out witnesses and gathering clues to solve the mystery.

Over its 9-minute running time, "Black & White" pokes fun at college campus stereotypes (especially as they manifest in romance fiction and dramas), detective fiction, the film noir movie genre, and perhaps even one or two other subjects that escaped my notice. The script is hilarious, with Rose's internal monologue causing me to have a near-constant smile on my face as the film unfolded, and the "what are going to do?" scene had me laughing out loud. I also loved the splashes of color that entered into the film as it reached its conclusion, effectively driving home the point that Rose has reached the end of her journey of discovery and that maybe better days are ahead. 

I also thought the film was nicely photographed, the soundtrack music was perfect, and the sound was always clear and well-balanced. That's actually a bigger deal than someone who doesn't watch a lot of these sorts of YouTube videos might realize. There have been many, many shorts that I've not bothered featuring here or at the "Terror Titans" blog, because the sound was so badly done that dialogue couldn't be heard clearly due to background noise or was drowned out by the soundtrack music due to bad mixing, or because the sound effects so badly integrated so as to be distracting. There are even some otherwise good films that are weakened by bad choice of soundtrack stock music.

I really only have one real complaint about "Black & White", and I don't know if I should be grateful for the filmmakers for giving me the opportunity to make it. There's a scene where Rose barges in on a guy sitting on the toilet, but he has his long-johns fully pulled up. Why? How? What could he have been doing there, dressed like that? It was such a weird moment that it pulled me out of the film. (There are some nitpicks, but I'm not going to call them out, because I understood and appreciated and was amused by what the filmmakers were going for, even if they didn't quite manage to pull it off.)

All in all, if you like film noir or college-based dramas or romantic comedies, I think you'll get a kick out of "Black & White". 

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"Black & White" was made by a group of then-students at Ramapo College in New Jersey. They created films under the name Collective Brain, because, according, to the person monitoring their Facebook page, their films were true group efforts and there was no clear delineation between who wrote what and who directed it. Unfortunately, if the views, likes, and subscriptions visible on the Collective Brain YouTube Channel are any indication, their efforts have not gotten a whole lot of traction or attention. That's too bad, because, if "Black & White" is any indication, they were creating good stuff. (It's not all bad news, though; I found a smattering of credits at IMDB for several of the members of the Collective, and at least one has been performing with a Shakespearean theatre company in Massachusetts. It appears they on their way to success in the Real World, YouTube be damned!)